Anick Soni, 24

Multi- disciplinary creative and intersex activist @ anickians

“The focus is on erasing intersex people by operating on them”

I was born intersex, which means that my body didn’t look like what the doctors were expecting, and they couldn’t see if I was a boy or a girl.

When I was 21, I decided to come out after reading a book called Golden Boy, which is about an intersex character. It was the first time I’d seen myself represented in fiction, and I realised that no one knew what intersex is and I didn’t know whether I was intersex enough.

Intersex people don’t currently have legal protections because we’re not included in the

2010 Equality Act’s list of different protected characteristics.

I was first operated on when I was four months old, to make me look more male — not because surgery was necessary for health reasons, which was never really explained to my parents.

When it comes to intersex bodies, the courts rarely get involved. Intersex people are generally seen as needing surgery, and you have people being operated on from a very young age — without understanding or consent.

Few places around the world outlaw these surgeries, despite the UN saying that unnecessary procedures shouldn’t be performed. The focus is on erasing intersex people by operating on them.

The NHS has confirmed that there are no clear statistics on how many people are intersex. The next logical step is to have it included in the census, or to be registered at birth, so we have some statistics.

When people question whether intersex people belong in the LGBTQIA+ community, I remind them that homosexuality was once seen as a medical problem but instead of the conversion surgeries intersex people have, they had conversion therapy.